Most Slavs were to be replaced (killed or deported), turned into slaves by those replacing (German farmer settlers), or Germanized. The Lebensraum thing.

But once the decision was made, the geopolitical ambition to control the Eurasian heartland, supported by the assiduous activity of geographers, anthropologists and ethnographers now working for institutes set up by Heinrich Himmler’s SS, became paramount. Hitler hoped that the resources embedded in Eurasia would supply what was necessary to defeat the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ powers and confirm the prediction made in 1919 by Mackinder that whoever controls the heartland (the ‘world island’) would dominate the globe. Mackinder had argued that technology, above all the railway, had transformed the strategic possibilities for whichever powers occupied the heartland. Hitler brought that argument up to date with plans for high-speed Autobahnen (highways) that would reach out across the Eurasian space, transforming the possibility of its development, but also ensuring that power could be projected wherever it was needed to safeguard the heartland’s security.

The paradigm used by German planners was essentially a colonial one. Though historians debate whether there was any direct continuity between German pre-1914 imperialism and the new project in Eurasia, there is no doubt that those engaged in the conquest and pacification of the new geographical zone thought in terms borrowed from the prevailing practice of territorial empire and the long history of racial discrimination and extermination that had accompanied it. Hitler’s famous comment that ‘Russia will be our India’, though it revealed how little he understood British imperialism, also revealed the extent to which the German project was seen as an extension of an existing geopolitical reality. The harsh racial policies, including the eradication of the Jewish population in the East, were part and parcel of a larger ethnic project which foresaw the Germanisation of Eurasia and the extermination of up to 30 million ‘useless eaters’. The remodelling of the entire area was at the core of General Plan East, an ambitious project for the geopolitical transformation of the Eurasian heartland.

The problem confronting Hitler (and the party’s planners and geographers) was obvious at the time. The Soviet Union was not ’empty space’, but was a rapidly arming and modernising industrial giant, with a well-organised state apparatus and a strong sense of identity as the world’s first communist state. Though the invading Germans sneered at what they viewed as primitive living conditions and ‘bestial’ people, when the war ended in August 1945 the whole of Mackinder’s heartland was occupied by the Red Army, from central Europe to Manchuria, and a new era of geopolitical thinking opened up as the Western states confronted the vast Communist bloc constructed after the war’s end. The imperial fantasy that had fed German nationalism for decades was overturned and the metaphorical ‘east’ became a real east of powerful and vengeful armies bent on destroying Germany’s imperial endeavour entirely.